Not to put too fine a point on it, but that will be "go @#$% yourselves"-levels of pissed for some people. And "we're small and all of us are full-Apple people" won't be at all assuaging -- neither will "we thought an app important enough to actually build one, but Android folks can just go ahead and use their browser."

Probably too late now, but I suppose you might have built a React Native app, to speed up an Android release.

Jumping into this late but caching/buffering is now doable in mobile browsers via the Service Worker spec. Apple was the holdout and they got it implemented in non-WKWebkitView mobile Safari in the iOS 11.3 or 11.4 release.

Some of that is legitimate so we probably will take it on the chin for doing iOS first. We interviewed both Android and iOS devs, but by chance the iOS devs were willing to join us but not the Android devs we knew. We didn’t think we had enough resources to build two teams.

Having said that, in the day we looked closely at React Natve and a wrapper app like Slack started with, but chose to go fully native. Things have come a long way since then so now we’re looking hard at other options besides fully native to get something sooner.

While it's not the same as an Android app, I added the Cake app to my home screen on my Android. I wasn't aware that was an option until someone here told me about it. In case it's new to you too, open Cake in the browser, then click the three dots to see options, select "Add to Home screen".

Ugh, I’m sorry to say no. I often wonder what it would have been like if we did Android first because many of our best posters are on Android. I get the feeling the iPhone is gradually fading and Android-based smartphones are beginning to lead in innovation and security.

We’ve just spent a week trying to get an upgraded version of our 5-star iPhone app in the App Store. I understand their intent to make sure no bad apps get in, but the rejections we get are from crazytown.

The pain is we invested way too much time trying to build an all-native app. Eventually, we went to a browser-based app with added native components. We could do that because we invested so much in making the app work well in a browser. Had we approached it that way from the beginning, we would have been much further down the road by now.

The upside to finally seeing the light is it should make the Android app much easier to build.

1) Regular, non-techy people who would either buy an iPhone if they could afford one, or just don't care about mobile platforms at all so long as they have a camera and Facebook and can check their email.

2) And neophile, beta-tester-types, who like to tinker, and who actively do not want an iOS device for various technical or philosophical reasons.

I would not be surprised if the latter were (at least at one point, if maybe less so now) disproportionately represented among your users, because of their inclination to put up with less than fully-mature experiences, for the sake of checking out something new with interesting potential.

iOS people keen to check out something like cake.co are, I would guess, disproportionately Silicon Valley-types either involved in start-ups, or who actively follow that scene -- (non-neckbeard) tech hipster Apple enthusiasts who regularly retweet the sage sayings of SV-VC gurus. :-)

No doubt the iOS app kept some of those iOS people around, but it really seems to me that you're going to want the type-2 Android users (among whom I count myself) to stick around and contribute also, so as to get some critical mass of content here to make the structure and features of this place make more sense. And an Android app would probably help to some significant degree.

This was a serious pain to type because of the scrolling/typing issue with cake.co in Chrome Android -- I don't doubt that that's a Chrome bug, but I definitely do not encounter it on all web apps. Also, it has been easy for me to forget about cake with the lack of notifications.

Would an experimental Flutter or React Native, cross-platform project be feasible with your existing web and iOS developers, if a full-blown, full-native Android team isn't a near-future option?

You know, surprisingly, our Android users seem to be power users like @JazliAziz from Malaysia and @jpop from Croatia. I didn't see that coming, but they prefer Android over iOS. Quite a few people here in Silicon Valley, like Leo Laporte, prefer Pixel phones because they take better photos than iPhones do.

Surprisingly, the awful, horrible editor bugs you're seeing are Android bugs, not Chrome. If you were on a Chromebook or any other non-Android device accessing Cake, you would get rich text editing, link expansions, etc. It has to do with the keyboard handler. The Android team has so many open bug reports about it, and it affects so many apps, we thought for sure they would have fixed it by now.

And that creates a problem for us because instead of being able to do a browser-based app on Android, we would have to write the rich text editor natively, which is a big job. Even though Cake is built with React, React Native wouldn't save us because we use a third-party editor which doesn't work on Android. 😢😢😢

The amount of hoops I have had to jump in order to turn off notifications for this website is unbelievable. Over a year later still no app for people outside of California, I get emails but I cannot log in because unsubscribe link is not unique. I can't reset my long forgotten password because my email is not a login so I had to somehow deduct what was my username which I haven't used for a long time. All of it to learn that Cake is still stuck in the mental bubble of "sillicon valley is exactly as the rest of the world, buy Apple products to access". I had hopes about this place way back when but now I see that it is just another VC magnet designed by american tech bro mindset. I just hope that deleting a profile is going to be easier than it used to be on Facebook.

I'd suggest you try to take apart Basecamp Android app and see what they did. I know they rely on webviews for most of the content, and have great message editing features that seem to work ok (not sure if that part is native or not). And the app is tightly integrated into the OS (sharing, notifications...).

Since we're on the topic, thought I'd just share how I use Cake at the moment.

Not having an Android app means I never post anything from my phone. I don't even browse Cake from my phone even though I could via the browser, mostly due to the limited posting functionality. I only ever visit Cake on my laptop/PC.

Having said that, the presence of an Android app still wouldn't be the complete solution I'm looking for. Without a proper drafts system in place which allows you to save multiple drafts which sync between devices, an Android app would still be someone restricted.

The long-form posts I write typically take me a few days to compose. As it stands, I can only write on one device at a time, be it my laptop or my PC. Since drafts don't sync across devices, if I start a draft on one machine I must continue to write on the same machine. Having an Android app would be good for quick and short posts, but for the more in-depth posts that I write, I'd still be limited to either my PC/laptop.

Currently, I write my drafts in Google Docs, which I can use on either of my devices since they are all synced up. This gives me the freedom to write anywhere, anytime, on any device. Once the post is ready, I copy paste it into Cake and post it. An Android app would be great but only if we could sync drafts across devices, something which I hope is also in the works.